This is the record for what went well and what didn’t go well in the process of migrating the *.consumium.org sites (except https://c.consumium.org, that’s in Espoo)

This migration was completed on 2016-06-09. I would like to extend a warm you to https://TransIP.eu for showing compassion in my predicament and offering to credit me some of the costs incurred by requiring 2 servers for a period of a time.

<spam>Their operation is really top-notch and I have never had outages with them that I would not have been responsible. Ever since I started hosting free social media with them in July 2013 the service has been outstanding and their control panel does include ability to take snapshots of system disks and a VNC just in case someone is not comfortable working with cli. The first time I saw the VNC in the control panel and it started to show the Debian GNU/Linux white-on-black bootup in my browser I was impressed.. Then it moved to run level 6 and I was naturally like “Whoa! It can do that!”. TransIP.eu is maybe not the most inexpensive hosting guys out there at the moment but I tell you their service level and its consistency are worth all the extra money. SSD system disks are spaceous and very fast and just as soon as http://maidsafe.net/ starts I’ll be purchasing at least one 10€ unit of 2,000GB big storage (which can be grown to 400,000GB, slightly under 400TB). Scp’ing between 2 servers in the same data center in Netherlands I was able to clock 101 Mbit/s speed. That is almost a gigabit / second, normal HDD couldn’t handle that.</spam>

Debian8 -> Debian8 migration of 4 free social media instances. Debian GNU/Linux, Nginx for web server, MariaDB for RMDBS and ruby, PHP and python as langauges the services run on

Migration of diaspora* to a new server

https://d.consumium.org (how to install diaspora* freesome on Debian GNU/Linux)
diaspora* is the biggest and best known of the free social media. It has innovative features though is somewhat limited due to the creators thinking really hard about protecting the consumer from possible privacy related threats. The software is high quality and reliable. It uses a asymmetric sharing arrangement that is diametrical to twitter’s

The original raison d’être for the old server called Debian7. The name is not very well chosen and misleading since the machine was dist-upgraded to Debian8 stable without hick-ups. Diaspora* was originally installed in July 2013 which at the time took couple of days

Grabbed the database, app/views/home and public/uploads and inserted those into place and the pod looks fine now after the migration.

Email was more of an hassle and is covered in a separate paragraph you’ll find down this page.

– GNU social is a handy microblogging service.This instance was installed in 2016. Should pose no problems. MySQL was replaced with MariaDB during installation of this with no problems. Update: GNU social migration was the first one to be done. Grabbed the database (which contains the confs) and the ‘avatar’ and ‘files’ directories. Shut down. Put those in place and restart web server and GNU social was up with apparently all the old information from the previous box.

If you are getting an Error 400: After the migration the GNU social has been doing the same thing as before.. It often when trying to microblog gives an error “400”. Here one just needs to know to hit ctrl-r, no need to even hit ctrl-a ctrl-c, ctrl-r, ctrl-v as the software preserves what was written into the textbox.

Interesting point about Hubzilla and Friendica

Friendica and Hubzilla leverage the same instructional capital and best-practice which leads to that their installation instructions have many portions in common.

Migration of Hubzilla to a new server

https://hub.consumium.org – (how to install Hubzilla freesome)
Hubzilla is a very high quality software and it has always worked just like the label said. It’s use of channels is intuitive as a way of interacting with other people.

This will probably not have the old database restored because when I originally installed this I didn’t realize the point is to have many many channels but just one login. Of course it might be possible to restore the database but manipulate it so that the Consum(er)ium relevant channels would be under the same user

Well I did restore the old database.

Pretty much everything that was needed for installation of Hubzilla was already there. Just needed to run ‘sudo aptitude install mcrypt php5-mcrypt’ and installed the Hubzilla, Stopped Nginx and dropped in the database and the user uploads located in /var/www/hubzilla/store and it seems to work fine.

Friendica is the least learning curve free social media solution for the people escaping Facebook more and more often.

the freesome of least steep learning curve for the people who want to free themselves of Facebook every now and then.

Friendica migration did not require copying over more than just the database as Friendica saves the uploaded files in the database and not flat file system.

Dealing with outgoing and incoming email

Getting email arrangements to work in a safe and reasonable way is by no means as easy as one may think at start. diaspora* email was configured to use SMTP over a TLS encrypted hop over to https://gandi.net‘s SMTP server. Took a while to figure out but I am guessing this will make the email look better to spam filters as the “origin” is under the same domain as the machines given in the MX records in DNS to be the Mail eXchange servers for consumium.org

‘sudo aptitude install sendmail’ installs sendmail, an MTA this is apparently all that is needed for PHP’s mail()-function to work.

The migration plan (and how it went)

(Note: to lazily get all the dependencies and hope there wasn’t old junk you could follow this post http://juboblo.gr/index.php/2015/12/02/original-howto-migrate-gnulinux-to-bigger-disk-with-clean-install-and-grab-all-apt-gettable-software-settings-and-files/)

Migration of system settings

Update services to latest version so you get the same exact version when you reinstall each service from latest release [✔]

Grab TLS key and cert – Remember to keep the key safe [✔] (note: exposing the server.key usually kept in /etc/ssl/private is very dangerous as it will expose all communications encrypted with that key)

Grab firewall settings allowing traffic to 22, 80 and 443 [✔] NMAP security scanner is great copyleft free tool for looking at this. tip: ‘nmap localhost’ inside the firewall and ‘nmap the IP address” from outside the firewall will be very useful scans for verifying firewall settings.

Grab confs:

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf [✔]

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/nginx.conf [✔]

Grab home dir [✔]

Grab logs [✔]

/var/log/nginx/access.log [✔]

/var/log/nginx/error.log [✔]

Then decided to grab all of /var/log into a .tar.gz, Is only logs, cannot hurt and [✔]

Mass grab /etc and /var/www for later reference when the old server is recycled and resources returned to cloud.

Get new server. [✔] Remember to install an ssh server when installing the software or you’ll be unable to access via ssh. Only if hosting guys provide a Virtual Network Console you can fix this problem there

Add self to sudoers [✔]

Restore home dir contents [✔]

Install Nginx [✔]

Put logs, key, cert and nginx.conf in place [✔]

Repeat following steps for each service

Install dependencies [✔]

Install new service clean [✔]

NOTIFY USERS THAT NOW IS FEW HOURS OF DATA LOSS IF YOU POST Better idea: When all is ready with the new installation in place and you are thus ready to start the DNS change propagation tell people that the database will be frozen when the old machine is “unreachable” due to the DNS already pointing to the next machine.

#canworkwithoutsudo but this HowTo assumes #havesudo . Should be straightforward even #withoutsudo if existing LAMP (GNU/Linux, Apache or Nginx, MariaDB or MySQL and php) installed on the system. I used MariaDB and Nginx since the https://d.consumium.org #diaspora pod is configured to use that.

I’m not sure if php5-xcache (an opcode cache system) is what the official installation instructions refer to as ‘opcache’. At least /etc/php5/mods-available/ is showing a opcache.ini so I’m guess it was that.

Downloading GNUsocial code

‘sudo mkdir /var/www/gnusocial’

‘sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/gnusocial/’

‘sudo chmod g+w /var/www/gnusocial/’

‘sudo git clone https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social.git gnusocial/’

and you are done

Creating the database

From shell run

mysqladmin -u "root" -p create social

GRANT ALL on social.* TO 'social'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'agoodpassword';

The command above is to be executed in the MariaDB client (start it with ‘mysql -uroot -p social’)

Get an SSL cert and key for your GNU social instance

I have not yet tried out https://letsencrypt.org/ but have heard good things about it and you cannot really beat the price of 0€. A few companies I am clientele of are supporting it financially. Mainly https://gandi.net – a very nice registrar. Good even if not the cheapest around. High sortiment of domain names and rock solid tek with the latest copyleft solutions.

Configure Apache/Nginx with the help of the example .conf files in the directory you cloned the social software into.

You can test the configuration file makes sense by

‘sudo nginx -t’

Remember to reload after editing.

‘sudo service nginx reload’

Finishing up

Once you have configured you httpd there is still one thing to do before proceeding to https://social.example.com/install.php

For some reason the installation guide did not mention that the default settings in the httpd.conf.example file expects unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; to just be there.